Artist Ewa Tarsia Brings Living Growing Plant Life to the WAG

The Winnipeg Art Gallery is going green this summer thanks to Winnipeg artist Ewa Tarsia. Green … Grass … Dot … will open in mid-July and continue throughout the summer.In conjunction with this exhibition, the Gallery Shop is presenting Dot … Dot … Dot … , a show and sale of Ewa Tarsia’s works from July 19 to August 21. There will be a public opening reception from 6 to 9pm, Thursday, July 26.

Designed and executed in collaboration with 5468796 Architecture Inc., the exhibition takes various forms and locations, all reflecting our relationship with the natural world. The ramp in front of the WAG building will be a burst of green balls of foliage while other vibrant plant life will be suspended in the rooftop pool. Recycled material becomes an arboreal extravaganza throughout the Gallery.

“The WAG was drawn to Ewa’s proposed exhibition due to its innovative and unexpected uses of the building’s spaces and exterior façade,” says Chief Curator Helen Delacretaz. “Her juxtaposition of the natural environment against our beautiful Tyndall stone façade makes for interesting comparisons of colour and texture, none the least being the contrast of the living, growing components against the tableau of limestone.”

“I live for nature and art,” says Tarsia. “All living things radiate beauty, and I only expose it to view. This exhibition started in my garden, where I freed grass to thrive in new places and to shift into new shapes. I let it grow on raindrops, and soon little spheres dotted my garden in unfamiliar spots. The lowliest of plants in most perfect of shapes.
This project encapsulates my commitment to environmentally responsible living and art. The installations invite reflection on our relationship with the natural world, the world which gave us our first breath but which we now smother with poisonous fumes. The exhibition transforms an urban space into a multi-media, multi-dimensional canvas and fills it with vibrant, extravagant, living and imagined plants, trees, and grasses. Grasses of life. It is meant to be provocative, it is meant to be ecological, it is meant to breathe and exude the air of art.”